Last year Holly Tucker set up a consulting agency for creative businesses.
Photograph: PR

Holly Tucker has seen everything the business world can throw at a fledgling company. The serial entrepreneur best known for founding Notonthehighstreet.com – an online marketplace for artisanal and niche products – started the brand from her kitchen table in 2006, growing it to a multimillion-pound firm. It now employs more than 200 people and has helped some of its own sellers reach that magic million pound mark.

With such success – including an MBE for services to small businesses and enterprise – you’d be forgiven for thinking Tucker, 40, might be ready to slow down a bit. Instead, she’s doing it all again.

Last year, Tucker set up Holly & Co, a consulting agency for creative small businesses. She says: “I said many a time ‘never again’, but I realised that I was still as fascinated in [creative small businesses] as I was the day I thought up Not On The High Street.”

She sees this as simply extending the journey she started in 2006. “I’m not doing it all again, I’m building on top of my experience, rather than building from ground level. It’s these foundations that allow me to have some authority – the experience, the war wounds, the trauma. I can relate to building a kitchen-table business into something bigger.”

Don't copy big business, you have got to look at things differently

While Tucker has seen her business grow into a major brand, she’s adamant that small businesses don’t always have to copy their bigger rivals: “You have got to look at things differently.”

Tucker admits that there are “about a billion things” she’d do differently with Not On The High Street if she could do it again, but she refuses to have regrets, seeing any wrong moves as part of the experience. While Tucker, whose energy and ambition earned her the childhood nickname Holly Hurricane, says she wishes she had stopped and “smelled the roses” during the early years of her journey, getting her MBE made it all seem worth it: “I remember standing round the corner from the Queen and thinking: ‘I must have done something OK’.”

So what advice would she give to people starting out? “For the small creative business, the most important thing is being strong and having those roots planted. These are the things that are going to be the most prominent for small businesses to weather any storm – be that Brexit, the landlord putting up the rent or someone copying your design.”

But it’s also about something a bit more personal. Tucker wishes she had listened to her instincts more. “If I had understood the importance of my gut,” she says, “I do think at some sliding door moments I would have taken a right not a left. I call it my internal compass now, and I tell people: ‘Anyone can tell you anything but when your gut is telling you not to listen and to go with your instinct, that’s your internal compass and it will never let you down.’”

While some may be concerned about the future of small business, Tucker thinks it’s time for SMEs to take centre stage. “I think it’s the beginning of the small business revolution and, within that, creative small businesses specifically.” While there may be challenges ahead, Tucker believes life is easier for small businesses now than in previous years, pointing to the impact of social media. “The place I was in in 2006 was a very different landscape – what is available to me today certainly wasn’t available to me 13 years ago.”

Helping small businesses navigate the same challenges that dogged her, as well as some of the newer stumbling blocks they may face, is what drives Tucker – who is now UK business ambassador for creative industries and small creative businesses.

“I feel like small businesses need a pied piper. Someone has got to do this so small businesses feel empowered and the ‘imposter syndrome’ we all suffer is tackled. I don’t actually feel I have a choice about this – it’s my calling.”

Holly Tucker spoke at the Disruptor Debate, a Guardian event supported by Aldermore

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